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In 2025: six convicted in a D.C. Labor Day triple murder

On July 3, 2025, a Washington, D.C. jury delivered guilty verdicts against six people for a triple murder committed nearly four years earlier, over Labor Day weekend in 2021. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced the convictions, closing out one of the city's most closely watched recent prosecutions — a coordinated mass shooting that left three people dead and three more wounded.

The H. Carl Moultrie Courthouse, home of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

Image: APK (CC BY)

The defendants found guilty included Erwin Dubose, Kamar Queen, Damonta Thompson, and William Johnson-Lee, the four men whose names anchor the case in the court record. They were not the only people held responsible. In all, six were convicted, among them a woman from Rockville, Maryland — a detail that underscored how far the violence prosecutors described reached beyond the immediate scene of the shooting. What began as a holiday-weekend bloodbath in the District ended, years later, with a courtroom full of people awaiting a verdict that touched households well outside the city limits.

The crime traced back to the long holiday weekend of 2021, a stretch of late summer when Washington, like many cities, sees more people gathered in its streets and parks. According to the government, the shooting was not a spontaneous flare of tempers but part of a planned act of violence. By the time the case reached trial, prosecutors had built it as a conspiracy — an agreement among multiple people to carry out the attack — alongside charges of first-degree murder for the three lives that were taken. The framing mattered: it meant the jury was asked to weigh not only who pulled triggers, but who agreed in advance to make the killings happen.

Three people were killed and three others were wounded in the gunfire. Coverage of the verdict described the episode as a mass shooting, language that captures both the number of victims and the indiscriminate danger of an attack that struck six people in a single burst of violence. One account went further, characterizing the case as an "act of war" — the kind of phrasing that signals how seriously the District's justice system came to view the killings, and how the prosecution presented them less as an isolated dispute than as an organized assault.

The guilty verdicts were only the first act. At a later sentencing hearing, the punishment matched the gravity of the crime. Three of the men received sentences of more than 100 years each, and the figures identified as the ring leaders of the group drew terms well past the century mark. Those numbers place the case among the most severe outcomes the D.C. courts have handed down in recent memory — the product of a years-long investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department working alongside federal prosecutors, who together pieced the case together across the gap between the 2021 shooting and the 2025 trial.

Metropolitan Police Department headquarters at the Henry J. Daly Building, Washington, D.C.

Image: Jonestoddj (CC BY-SA)

The public record, for now, rests largely on the U.S. Attorney's announcements and local news coverage of the verdict and the sentencing. Those sources establish the core facts — who was convicted, when, and the broad shape of the punishment — but many details that would round out the story remain either sealed or unconfirmed in the publicly available reporting. The victims' identities, the precise role each defendant played, and the exact terms imposed on every person convicted are not all spelled out in the accessible record, and we've held this account to what those sources actually support rather than filling the gaps with guesswork.

What makes the July 3 verdict resonate is the distance between the crime and the reckoning. The shooting happened in 2021; the convictions came in 2025; the sentences followed after that. For the families of the three people killed, that arithmetic represents the better part of four years spent waiting for a courtroom to assign responsibility. For the District, the case stands as an example of how a holiday-weekend act of violence can demand years of forensic work, witness cooperation, and prosecution to resolve — and how, when it finally does resolve, the consequences can stretch across the rest of the convicted defendants' lives. On the calendar of true crime, July 3 now marks the day that reckoning arrived.

Today in True Crime by CaseBond — 2026-07-03